Rachel Hewitt

Hewitt attended the University of Oxford, where she studied English Literature at Corpus Christi College for a BA and M.St. She completed a PhD in 2007 in English literature at Queen Mary University, London, with a thesis on romanticism and mapping titled Dreaming o'er the Map of Things: The Ordnance Survey and Literature of the British Isles, 1747-1842.[2][3] In 2009, she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to the Department of English and Drama at Queen Mary.[4]

Hewitt's first book Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey was published in 2010 by Granta,[5] and built on her PhD thesis work. Hewitt was awarded a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction for this project. [6] In 2011, Hewitt was announced as one of ten BBC Radio 3 AHRC New Generation Thinkers.[7][8]

Her second book A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind was published by Granta in 2017,[9] and explores the decade of the 1790s through the biographies of five people: poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, medic Thomas Beddoes, and photographer Thomas Wedgwood.[10] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.[11][12]

In April 2023, she published In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors, a book which explores the histories of women's participation in sport and the 'great outdoors', interwoven with a personal memoir about loss.[13][14] Hewitt was awarded an Eccles British Library Writer's Award in 2018 for this project.[15]

Hewitt has three daughters, and lives in Yorkshire.[20] She was married to Pete Newbon, a lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle, who died in January 2022.[21] She is a keen runner and has been running since her mid-20s.[22]

• Rachel Hewitt on The Guardian
• Rachel Hewitt tag on The Bookseller